Karen Beckman

On her book Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“Histories of cinema and automobile are inextricably intertwined.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“I wanted to capture the essential and radical hybridity of both the medium of film and of Cinema Studies. As Cinema Studies becomes more of a ‘discipline’ in its own right, I think we have to be careful not to throw the bastard out with the bathwater.”

On the second:

“On the one hand, the automobile offers a private interior and safe space akin to a home, except that it allows the driver to be alone in a way that the family home does not. On the other hand, the automobile represents an anonymous, high-speed, and transparent new technology aligned with the psyche’s desire for risk, exhibitionism, transgressive sociality, and speed.”

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017

It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016